We have added a Gift Upgrades feature that allows you to gift an account upgrade to another member, just in time for the holiday season. You can see the gift option when going to the Account Upgrades screen, or on any user profile screen.

Main Affinity Flavored Improvements and Removing Academies From Game

This is another idea I have on my list of mods to create which I'd like to see incorporated into the official version of the game:

1) Remove academies from the game! Please. They also have pretty f'ugly graphics (it's mostly strange-looking, Earth-like landscaping with a little bit of building -- always facing in the same direction without any slight rotation).

2) Slightly rebalance the existing bonuses for Domes, Nodes, and Biowells in preparation for the next steps.

3) For each affinity's perk which grants bonuses to either Domes, Nodes, or Biowells, make it mostly what players are always seeking... science! This way, you'll see a slight increase in "spamming" of appropriate improvements for each affinity. Hybrids will simply choose which ones they want to build and have more flexibility. Not too much of a science boost -- even with flavorful, beautiful improvements, you don't want anything like the old Academy spam. Plus, each of these improvements already have additional bonuses before this boost.

4) For the existing Knowledge virtue boost to Academies, simply change it to something entirely new, apply the bonus to some other type of neutral improvement that could use a little more love, or apply the +1 science to all three affinity improvements. But, again, we probably don't want them to be too powerful and too much of a no-brainer spam, so maybe that third option would be the least desirable.